Rome is good but I would still prefer Medieval III. I think if they were to do something more modern they would have to incorporate the whole world which wouldn't work well with the color the map game-play.

Rome: total war is my favorite game ever. I love the period, the culture, the philosophy and every damn thing about it.

The game is getting a bit old by now though, so this is pretty damn awesome! Just don't mess too much with it. I am probably a lone voice in this, but Shogun 2 was getting a bit too many features that I really didnt need. It also slowed the game down to a crawl between turns which is annoying.

The problem with the Total War series is they're limited to time periods where melee combat is a major component because of the tactical variety it brings. You have to have units that are faster or slower, can charge or flee, etc if you want to do anything interesting tactically, which is half the game. Besides the crippling bugs, one of the biggest problems in Empire was that combat came down to two lines of infantry shooting at each other - cavalry being the exception. Imagine Shogun, Rome or Medieval where all you had was archery units. Still a great game? Empire was about the most modern thing they could do. WW1, 2 or anything beyond that might still have a great strategic component but the combat would be broken.

If they want to stop making sequels, they should really create a fantasy themed Total War. The engine would be perfect for elvish archers, dwarven infantry, trolls, giants, castles, whatever. Then they wouldn't need opposing sides to be palette swapped same units - they could create truly different sides with their own unique models and completely different abilities. I suppose a sci-fi theme could also work if they adopted a melee model.

Rome TW was my favourite time period, so Rome 2 sounds good to me; but sooner or later they are going to have to stop pumping out sequels and come up with a new idea. Will people really buy Shogun 3 in 5 years time? (after Medieval 3 and Empire 2, presumably?)

Rome TW has been my favorite setting too, and the one I played the most (by far). While I used to enjoy all of the RTS battles, I think I'm starting to prefer the overland map/strategy more now. Some of the TW battles can get really tedious tracking down little blips spread out across the map.

This demo is all about scale, and what the latest iteration of CA’s proprietary strategy engine can do with it. The battle of Carthage is the setting for a seamless assault by sea and land. A vast force of Roman ships pile from the black ocean into a sweeping coastline, expelling hundreds of legionaries onto a beach overlooking the towering fortress-city of Carthage as arrows and rocks rain down on them. It’s Saving Private Ryan in sandals, and a dramatic statement that navies and armies are no longer separate, compartmentalised entities for Total War.

« Last Edit: July 02, 2012, 06:42:00 PM by CeeKay »

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Because I can,also because I don't care what you want.XBL: OriginalCeeKayWii U: CeeKay

I'm so damn annoyed at this game right now. I have been waiting for a long time, and was prepared to forgive a lot of things, but its simply not very interesting. The game is way more hard on your hardware than Shogun 2, even though CA claims it the same. I can hardly play naval battles at all. The tactical AI is completely braindead, and just rushes your missile troops more or less one at a time. There is no strategy at play, no tactics, no troop cohesion other than at the start.What little strategy the AI has is extremely easy to pull apart with a single horseunit and a light skirmisher, pulling their troops apart completely.

Turns take 3-4 minutes per turn for, and the latest bug is that the game decided to to just END TURN at once, after it was my turn. Fun stuff.

Other than that, the game feels so immensely slow, mostly due to the turns taking so long, that its incredibly boring. I've been reading a book while playing it today, and SURELY thats not how its meant to be played?The UI is horrible, in that I can't find ANYWHERE that tells me how much food I generate each month. I suppose I could look at every city I have, and every building, and count it, and try to figure out how much food is being spent as well somewhere, but SURELY thats not how its meant to be played?

I managed to hear a small part of a speech by accident...why on eart should I listen to a speech AFTER the battle begins?

Honestly, since Empire they have been consistently going in the wrong direction with every single game, and this is the final step for me. For me, the pinnacle of this series was back in the Rome and medieval 2 era, since right now the game is simply just boring and a waste of time.

I almost feel like crying because of this, since this was my most anticipated game this year, and it fizzles out to this? So sad....

And all I've done is get through most of the prologue so it's way too early to judge, but so far I am pretty disappointed as well. I have a string of curse words a mile long just waiting to unleash, but I'll wait until I experience more of the game before I let loose.

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LD

"Let your enemies fear, for a harlequin of the Laughing God dances at your side."

Reeeeeeeally let down by Day 1. This is one of the few games I pre-ordered this year - I'm in the camp of folks with crippling Day 1 performance issues. Well-nigh unplayable even with all settings on the absolute lowest - framerates are miserable, and the animation of all the units is jerky as heck - the whole thing, design decisions aside, is currently an unplayable mess for me.

Going to shelf this one for a few patches, I guess. Shame, as I adored the original Rome. Might have to fire up an older TW game to get my fix until this is functional.

Glad I resisted temptation... Another bullet dodged. I can wait also Creative Assembly joined Bioware in the wait until reviews before I buy category. My PC is two years old and is due for an upgrade, but no money means I can wait for this game. Another buy when Steam has another sale

Some corner of me is relieved. Rome: TW was my favorite and most played of the series, but my five year old system would be lucky to even launch this thing. It sucking lets me sneer at a big pile of sour Roman grapes.

I'd really like to play this now because of the positive nostalgia I have for the original, but it sounds like the game could benefit from a few optimization and gameplay patches. It seems like this has become the norm for CA releases.

I'm kind of surprised to read the impressions above. Rome Total War was in my top 3 games of all time, so I had this pre-loaded and took the day off work. I'm usually VERY cautious about release dates (MOO 3 and HoMM V ended the glory days of day 1 gaming for me) but I took a chance on RTW2.

I'm running on extreme settings and haven't had a problem of any kind yet, and I played for about 6 hours yesterday. I completed the prologue and then played a few hours worth of a new campaign. I haven't seen too many bugs or problems - one issue where when I targeted my spy on a city the action menu wouldn't come up, but that was about it.

The AI seems serviceable. The strategic AI is smart enough on Hard; I left a city on the coast undefended to move up towards the front lines, and the cpu enemy sailed his forces right past my army and took the city behind me. The tactical AI isn't genius, that's true, but I haven't seen it do anything too stupid yet. For the most part it just moves up it's ranged forces, and then tries to flank. Yes, it's fairly easy to pull it apart but I don't know what the alternative would be; should the AI stubbornly stay in formation no matter what kind of pounding it's taking? It seems to charge when it doesn't have a choice.

The UI is a bit difficult but I'm getting used to it. My biggest annoyance so far is not seeing at a glance what tech I'm researching or how it's coming along; I always dismiss the notification that a new tech has been researched (which is very generic) and then completely forget to set a new one until the end of the turn when the reminder comes up. I like the new strategic view, I like the change to armies having to be with commanders (which prevents me from having to build garrisons or fight 800 stupid little 1 unit armies everywhere), and I like the way naval is integrated with land armies. I hated Naval in Shogun.

There was a question about how much food you have - there are 4 critical info bites displayed on the bottom right of the UI: money, next turn projected income, food... and something else that I can't remember.

So far I'm not disappointed with my purchase, although I can't remember the last time I paid $60 for a game. It's Rome Total War but bigger and better. I showed my kid a cavalry charge into the rear of some slingers and we both laughed with glee. That's what RTW is supposed to do, so I'm good.

**edit: oh, and the comment about the speeches: this change is awesome! Instead of a dumb cutscene before every battle, your commander makes a speech to his men the moment you start the battle! If you stay zoomed in to your forces as you give them their initial orders you hear them exhorting the troops while they're preparing, getting into formation and starting to march. The speech gets more and more animated as they get closer to the moment of battle. Same for naval, you hear your admiral telling his men to get ready, steady, steady...! It feels very realistic and much more atmospheric than the old speeches before battle. I love this one!

So, some more thoughts after not having played the game for a day now, compared to what I think most fans of Rome 1 wanted. I realize most of my thoughts about the game are negative, but I've tried to comment on why and make an argument compared to the old Rome game, so it is hopefully not just random bashing.

Roman Families - The old game had this. We had a family tree where we could see our generals, their children, the wives, and everything. It was pretty cool, and the fact that you could have a general which was a drunken, pagan but utterly brilliant on the battlefield general was so damn inspired, and made me care about the generals, and I was devastated when they died, because of all the times he''d save me, or his skills were invaluable as a governor in a city. The advertisments for Rome 2 seemed to build a lot on that, making us see you could conspire, scheme and plot the downfall of your enemies in the grand political arena. What did we get? A screen where we have four standard options with our generals that leads to pretty much nothing. How's that for a political arena? The generals you choose are nameless fops that dies SO damn fast I have no attachment to them. Every turn they get more households, but I have no idea why I should care, since it really doesn't seem to matter if they have +1 or not. Or rather, I don't know if it matters, but it doesn't seem like it. It not like I can see what other household troops he has on that screen either, so I don't know if I should put it in the pool or not. In the old game, generals got some nice traits based on what happened, and some random ones as well, and this is there, but in a *very* limited way. Based on what CA said, and the commercials, I think they wanted to do a lot more with this, but ran out of time.

Random events - Where the heck did they go? In the old game, they added tons of atmosphere to the game, both in terms of historical events (Invention of the screw, anyone?) and random events that just added flavour to the game. I've seen plague, but it comes at EXACTLY the same time, in EXACTLY the same place place in the few games I've tried. Right now, all I get each month after a while in the overview is buildings and such.

Overland map - This is fine I guess. I personally like the old parchment style map better, but thats personal preference I guess. Its just hard to get an overview over the areas without resorting to the diplomatic map, which takes too long (on my machine) to load for me to even consider using it regularly. I don't understand why we have to press each city to get the information I want, but I guess thats progress. I do also think the map is somewhat barren. Perhaps its the uncanny valley effect but the more realistic the map looks, the less interesting it seems to become.

UI - Well, I won't say much about this, because frankly its a horrible mess, but I have a nagging suspicion why, which I will come back to later.Army Battles: This is, for me the meat of the game. It was something I enjoyed immensely in Rome1 and medieval 2 and to some extent in the first shogun as well. They are, unfortunately, a big disappointment in this game. First off, they are waaayyyy too fast. About 5 minutes for most battles. The AI is pretty stupid, even worse than normal from what I've seen so far. Its way too easy to split the enemies army in two or more, or make them just stand in utter confusion and get pelted by missiles. They do use missiles fairly well, but are not very good on the receiving end of them it seems. That will most probably be patched of course.Units do move WAY too fast right now, and I've been thinking about how that can be, and why the battles are so much shorter and after replaying Rome 1 a bit, I now know why. The battlefields themselves are WAY smaller than in Rome 1, and we used to start a lot farther apart and this makes all the difference in scope. Right now, what we have a smaller , faster engagements where we start pretty much in sight of each other in the maps I've seen so far (By the way, are the maps in any way randomized? I've seen the same village without walls about 40 times by now). I do again have a suspicion about why this is, but more about that later. The special abilities are very nice, but the battles are so damn fast that I've yet to get around to use them, because the battle is over before I remember them.I have yet to loose a battle, which leads to utter boredom with the game again, which is a major theme so far for my experience with the game so far. I spend most of my time on the campaign map, just ending the turns, reading a book while the 100 factions do their thing, and then move my spies, perhaps invade a city, rinse repeat.

Naval battles: These are unplayable for me, for several reasons. One is I don't understand how the heck it works. This is probably a me issue, but I can't for the life of me fathom why my ships sometimes moves and attacks, and at other times, they just sit dead still in the water. Secondly, it chops so badly everything moves at intervals, making them unplayable for me. THANKS OBAMA! Other than that, they are probably fine, but I don't care much for them personally. They *are* an addition to the old game, and thats nice!

All in all, I find the game rather boring right now, and nothing like advertised and NOTHING at all like a Rome 2 game. I realize that this is a Shogun 3 game with roman themes instead, but that just makes me sad.I think most of the fans of the old Rome game wanted an updated Rome game. Instead, they got a reskinned Shogun /Empire game.

My nagging suspicion, which is part of both how the UI works, and how the battles are now, faster, shinier and less options because of the speed, is that CA is is taking the series towards consoles. Its based on both what the CA boss said in an interview, and on how they are developing their games currently. Sadly, that means I'm probably not their target group anymore but I guess thats becoming more and more common.

Quote

Talking to MCV at E3 last week, SEGA West boss Jurgen Post explained that "if next gen consoles become as successful as people say we can look to move some of our big properties on PC over to those machines".

I don't see console development as a bad thing, but only for next gen where the console spec is actually higher than most PCs Creative Assembly has to program for. The slower pace of Total War's RTS elements would also suit consoles. Having a single hardware spec with serious multi-core processing will probably help CA avoid bugs more than it complicates matters developing for that higher spec.

The problem is crapping out a game to fester on their fans as they move on to other projects, and tossing out this disgusting Blood and Gore DLC, which isn't disgusting because of the content, but because it would have been in the game normally as an option, or as a free DLC.

I wonder how well a more narrow and focused Total War game would go over with fans as a way to reset and start fresh, with the idea that it's a new engine and methodology to build on for future Total War games, so that they stop inheriting the faults of previous games. Relic Entertainment's RTS games are really guilty of this as well, game after game you can see the same bugs cropping up in every version of their games, and even if it's not a bug, you see the same mistakes that lead to balance issues. I fear this will not change now that Sega has them and is the reason why CA is what it is now.

Console development is not a bad thing, I agree. Its when the current version clearly suffers because of them trying to wangle in some stuff that seems geared towards being used on big screen tv's instead of monitors, that I take exception to it. I don't doubt there is an audience for Total War on the consoles and it could probably work if they had some good UI artists and did some decent thinking on how the controls are supposed to work.

The fact is, though, that their latest game has been a mess. Whether its because of resources being wrangled towards another version, project management or who knows what, I don't know nor really care about. All I care about is, that what has been my most anticipated game these last few years, is just not that good a game. Of course, part of my personal disappointment is of course that its an iteration of Shogun 2, and not Rome, something that I know many fans are upset about.

On top of that though, are the stupid, idiotic design decisions (Magic gate opening torches..really, CA? Autoresolve still doesn't work, not feature complete like Civil war in countries other than Rome does nothing and the list goes on and on and on) and the bugs, and the poor AI which leads to what we have today.

As long as CA remember what made their games stand out, they should be fine in the console area as well. Recent events don't inspire confidence in that, though.

Didn't realize this was so rushed. I mean, I heard there were the typical issues like bad AI, maybe a little worse, but not that the best (and needed) features of previous games were gone.

It's weird, I mean, at least with Company of Heroes 2, a game in a similar situation, they did things like drastically improved the Skirmish AI. We're talking AI that's good enough to put up a fun and interesting fight in an RTS, and not just with the numbers game.

The units in TW games are just large blocks of guys, and some terrain zones to deal with. If the CoH2 crew can do wonders with tactical skirmish AI, Creative Assembly needs to get their act together to really make TW a flagship series again.